Confessions of Crime-Volume 1 (1991)

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General		Extras
Category	Documentary	None
Rating
Year Of Production	1991
Running Time	87:51 (Case: 120)
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	1,2,3,4,5,6	Directed By	Chris Pye
Studio Distributor	Warner Vision	Starring	Theresa Saldana
Case	Amaray-Transparent-Secure Clip
RPI	$19.95	Music	Vaughn Johnson Brad Smith

    Theresa Saldana (The Commish) hosts this tabloid-style pap, promising to discover the motivations behind murderous acts such as these and what ordinary people can do to avoid such confrontations. Saldana herself was the victim of an attempted murder and uses her experience to augment this fluff, without managing to raise the level of interest one iota. Each case features actual excerpts from the murderer's confession to the authorities, and in most examples is laughably ambivalent.

    The most frustrating aspect to this program is that it promises so much, but fails to deliver anything of any real substance besides titillating grabs of gory details. We are offered the answers to why these acts occur, what motivates the murderers and how we can stop this from happening to ourselves. At the show's conclusion, Theresa's parting remarks are: "Perhaps we'll never know". How satisfying!

    Does that mean I just wasted two hours of my life? Perhaps I'll never know.

• Sharper Than A Serpent's Tooth (22:22) - A better title would have been "Blunter than the Average Bear". Brian Britton was an average teenager on the outside. With the mental capacity of a grapefruit and an unnatural fascination with Rambo, this boy's knucklehead father was trusting enough to leave loaded weapons around the house. Brian got upset with his family one evening and solved the problem by gunning all three of them down in his home.
• Till Death Do Us Part (21:54) - A murderer of a different kind, Edith Mendez was subjected to unrelenting mental and physical abuse at the hands of her sadistic husband. Unable to tolerate any more physical torture, she knifed her man in the chest after he jokingly challenged her to do so. She got a manslaughter charge and a restricted sentence.
• My Will Be Done (22:25) - When the Mormons knocked back Jeff Lundgren's application for a pastorship, he started his own bizarre offshoot of the faith. A group of mindless sheep followed and fed his thirst for power and control until he decreed that a sacrifice was needed to purge the group's sins. The poor Avery family drew the shortest straw, and paid the ultimate price for their faith - execution style.
• For The Love Of Angel (21:30)- Quiet and reserved Oliver Petrovich was having a secret relationship with a pretty black girl that his insanely racist, redneck parents wouldn't approve of. After four months of hiding her in his cupboard he was busted by his hysterical father and instinctively reacted by shooting both of his parents dead.

Video

    Made for American television, Confessions of Crime is presented in its originally broadcast ratio of 1.33:1, full frame.

    The level of detail is as good as you would expect from a fourteen year old cable television program - this looks about as sharp as a VHS recording. The screen captures on the front cover slick give a good idea of the quality of this transfer.

    Colours often appear oversaturated and smeared. Skin tones appear orangeish and unnatural.

    Being from a magnetic tape source, there are no film artefacts to be concerned about. MPEG artefacting was rare, although this picture is already so burred that I doubt anyone would notice.

    There are no subtitle streams included on this disc, however the poor audio contained in the actual confession footage is augmented by burned-in subtitling.

    This disc is single sided and single layered (DVD5 format).

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    There is one audio stream included on the disc, a wafer thin English Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo track.

    The dialogue and narration of the program is generally easy to understand apart from some barely discernable confessional footage that reaches a new low in clarity. I'm honestly baffled as to how material of this quality could be admissible as evidence.

    There are many portions of loud hiss during file interview footage, however there are no problems concerning audio clicks or dropouts.

    The soundtrack score is nothing special, typical of the overly dramatic and cheap feel of many of these shows from the 90s.

    There was no surround activity or subwoofer response in this soundtrack.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

    None.

    This title only appears to be available in Region 4 at the moment.

    The video transfer is ordinary to say the least.

    The audio transfer is similarly unimpressive.

    There are no extras.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall